65 Comments

What's interesting is it isn't even worth considering these models UNLESS you go with 1TB, because all the other capacities aren't nearly price competitive with the competition. Fortunately for Samsung, there is no competition at the flagship capacity, so they could charge whatever they want.Reply

Hard for me to justify the 48-55% price premium of the 840 EVO over the Crucial M500 (250 GB and 500 GB versions). At some point "faster" SSD's hits diminishing returns in "real life" scenario's...Reply

"I wasn't able to find the EVO mSATA on sale anywhere yet, hence the prices in the table are the MSRPs provided by Samsung. For the record, the MSRPs for EVO mSATA are only $10 higher than 2.5" EVO's, so I fully expect the prices to end up being close to what the 2.5" EVO currently retails for."

If it helps your decision at all, I just upgraded my wife's notebook (Lenovo Y580) from a 2.5" 250GB Samsung 840 (not pro) to an mSATA 240GB Crucial M500 (and then put the stock 750GB HDD back in) and it's phenomenal. The M500 feels snappier, but that could just be due to restoring the existing Windows image onto a clean drive. Either way, it was a great $130 upgrade.

If you have a free mSATA port on your notebook, it's a no-brainer to get an SSD for it.Reply

The trim behavior might be something introduced with one of the latest firmwares. I have a Samsung 840 250GB and I recently tried doing some steady state tests. After hammering it with writes, trim does not restore performance immediately. However with normal usage/light workloads, or keeping the drive idle, however, it will eventually (in a matter of hours) return back to the initial performance.

I guess this is some kind of strategy to improve long term wear/stability/write endurance. Maybe some sustained write protection kicks in to avoid writing immediately at full speed after trimming the free space.Reply

Tell me Kristian please would EVO 120GB msata have any advantage over EVO 250gb msata in longer battery life when you compare power consuptipon vs. disk busy times and mb/s.I use my ultrabook only for mails ,somtimes wathing movies and surfing.I dont need more then 120GB SSD but i am willing to buy 250Gb if it would give me more battery life.What i wanted to see in your benchmark is MobileMark 2012 because msata is for laptops and that is where battery life play big roleReply

Do you also think Multi-TB HDDs are fine for consumer use? Since HDDs went over 1TB, they have been failing/wearing out for me regularly. I am sure you can find some theoretical numbers that say these are "fine for consumer usage" as well.

There is a big trend to bigger sizes but lower reliability. That trend can get stuffed.

Samsungs advantage of Being the only TLC player strikes me as a reason to avoid Samsung, so I can avoid TLC and decreasing endurance that goes with it. Reply

That's just your experience, it's not a proof that over 1TB hard drives are less reliable. We can't go out and start claiming that they are less reliable unless we have some concrete proof of that (failures on our end, statistics etc).

The same applies for TLC. All we have is the P/E cycle number and frankly it gives us a pretty good estimation of the drive's lifespan and those numbers suggest that the endurance of TLC is completely fine for consumer usage. Or do you think our calculations are incorrect?Reply

I think if you examine any aggregate source of reviews like Newegg you will see a significant drop in drive satisfaction do to early failures, since drives went over 1TB. So it isn't just some personal fluke that half of my >1TB drives have failed worn out, so far.

I am really sick of this trend of declining reliability being sold as good enough. If TLC is "good enough" I will take MLC with 3X "good enough" unless the we are talking about 1/3 the price for TLC.

Weren't the Samsung 840s failing in days for Anand last year?

Unlike reviewers, I use my products until they fail, so reliability matters a LOT, and is something that is going in the wrong direction IMO.Reply

Reliability is not the same as endurance. TLC has lower endurance, that's a fact, but it's not less reliable. Endurance is something you can predict (in the end all electronics have a finite lifespan) but reliability you cannot since there's a lot else than just NAND that can fail. I would claim that today's SSDs are much more reliable than the SSDs we had two years ago -- there haven't been any widespread issues with current drives (compared to e.g. early SandForce drives).

Yes, we had a total of three 840 and 840 Pros that failed but that was on pre-production firmware. The retail units shipped with a fixed firmware.

This isn't a new trend. Historically we can go back all the way to 1920s when light bulb companies started rigging their products so the lifespan would be shorter, which would in turn increase sales. Is it fair? Of course not. Do all companies do it? Yes.

I do see your point but I think you're exaggerating. Even TLC SSDs will easily outlive the computer as a whole since the system will become obsolete in in a matter of years anyway if it's not updated.Reply

Other than the fact that they both store data, SSDs and HDDs have nothing in common, so it's silly to presume a problem that isn't really what you think it is in the first place. HDDs got dirt cheap as we cross the TB threshold and with it went diligent QA. You want 2TB for $80, you're going to get a higher defect rate. And going to 4 or 5 platters just increases the failure points, but the razor thin margins are the culprit here.

In contrast, a bigger SSD just means either more chips, or higher density ones. But 16 chips is nothing new, and since there are no mechanical parts, nothing to worry about. Aside from OCZ, the SSD track record for reliability has been pretty solid, and Samsung (and Intel) far better than that. If you want to stick to 256G in your laptop out of a silly fear of TLC, you're just hurting yourself. The Anand guys have already shown how overstated the wear issue has become. Reply

I have 8 2TB drives since October 2011 running in 2 RAID 5 in my file server (consumer grade Samsung, WD, Hitachi). I have 2 1TB 2.5" drives running since 2 years in my desktop. I have a 1TB and a 1.5TB 3.5" drive for well over 4 years in external enclosures. Not one failed. So let's pit anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence, shall we?Reply

I'd like to see Samsung put out a 500Gb or 1TB SSD with a m.2 PCIe connection. That with an adapter for two m.2 PCIe drives on a PCIe x4 card would make my year. I'd finally be able to get all the drives out of my system and bring it down to just motherboard, cards, H100, and power supply. Reply

Do you think it would be beneficial to 'not' have Turbowrite at or above 500 GB and focus more on parallism?? I ask this because a 250 GB 840 Evo achieves about 260 MB/s after it runs out of TW cache. So I would expect the 500 GB or above Evo to atleast reach 500 MB/s.Reply

Question: do Samsung 840 EVO SSDs have less OP than the previous 840 ones, since a percentage of the reserved space is now used for the fixed SLC cache area/TurboWrite?With trim enabled, that should not be a problem (as it makes the drive have "dynamic OP" with free space), but under intense workloads it might, if it's the case.Reply

Please, oh please, oh please, oh please... let someone make a miniature RAID box for mSata SSDs!!!!!!!!! Room for five mSata SSDs like this with striping and either a Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.1 interface so we can all have multi-Gigabyte/sec transfer rates that can fit in ur shirt pocketses.Reply

16 die packages are possible at all NAND suppliers and it is relatively straight forward to implement. the issue is usually that there is minimal demand for anything requiring it. What percentage of the market is 1TB? I think we are talking less than 3% above 512G for consumers. let me know if I am wrong.

TLC is great for Samsung product margins. so far it hasn't led to a cost decrease for consumers.

Samsung's execution is the amazing part. they have good (or great) products in every market at every density. And they have the most aggressive marketing campaign. No one else has been able to achieve this. Reply

Thanks very much indeed for this review. I already have 2 Samsung PM851 512GB (MZMTE512HMHP-00000). And, just prior to reading this review ordered the 1TB model (MZ-MTE1T0BW).The price is AUD822.99 (ramcity.com.au), very expensive. However, the convenience of this form factor justifies cost from my point of view.Now, it's simply a matter of deciding which lappy it gets installed in.Reply

Tell me Kristian please would EVO 120GB msata have any advantage over EVO 250gb msata in longer battery life when you compare power consumption vs. disk busy times and mb/s.I use my ultrabook only for mails ,sometimes watching movies and surfing.I dont need more then 120GB SSD but i am willing to buy 250Gb if it would give me more battery life.What i wanted to see in your benchmark is MobileMark 2012 because msata is for laptops and that is where battery life play big role.Reply

You start off with the claim that "Samsung is in a unique position in the SSD market. It’s the only company in the consumer SSD business with a fully vertically integrated business model and zero reliance on other companies."

This is, however, not actually true. SK Hynix is in a similar position, as they've had their own controllers, NAND, and DRAM since their purchase of LAMD a year and a half ago. Admittedly, they hadn't actually released a completely in-house SSD using a LAMD controller until late last year with the release of the SH 920 series. In fact, the Surface Pro 2 uses an SK Hynix mSATA SSD (with a LAMD controller), as noted in Anand's review and iFixIt's teardown. SK Hynix also doesn't appear to be making the SH920 series available in retail outside of Asia, though Super Talent's Supernova3 series is available in retail in North America (from the likes of SuperBiiz and various third-party sellers on Amazon and Newegg) and appears to be rebranded 2.5" SK Hynix SH920 series drives.Reply

"Sure, Samsung isn't the only NAND manufacturer but it is the only one with a consumer orientated controller IP (although SK Hynix owns LAMD now but that deal has yet to materialize in a product)"

The thing is, while Hynix does have a LAMD based SSD, it's the same controller that other's are using. It's possible that Hynix has contributed to the firmware but it's not a fully in-house designed platform (the controller was designed way before the acquisition took place). Reply

That statement is also false, as SK Hynix's LAMD controller *has* materialized in products, as I pointed out in my previous post--they're available in complete systems like the Surface Pro 2 worldwide as well as standalone at retail (in East Asia). Also, it's disingenuous to say it's not fully in-house when the controller and firmware were designed and written by teams currently in the employ of SK Hynix, and even if one were to accept your contention that such an arrangement is not "fully in-house designed," the opening statement of the article does not all of a sudden become true, as Samsung is still not the only manufacturer with "a fully integrated business model" or "zero reliance on other companies." Reply

Why do people still use mSATA? It might not make a difference for IOPS, but when opening a program the higher sequential read of PCIe would be a benefit. The NAND could supposedly go faster than 540.Reply

Because the support for PCIe is very limited. There are only a handful of laptops that use PCIe SSDs (and some of the have a proprietary connector like the MacBook Air) and in the desktop world all PCIe SSDs are currently just two or more SATA SSDs in RAID (though that will change during the next few months). Reply

Any chance we could get an in depth review of Samsung's RAPID now that it is available on both the EVO and the PRO? I am curious if it would have a larger impact for writes on the PRO than the EVO since the PRO does not have the SLC write cache.Reply

One important point that was not captured in the review is thermal limiting. Our experience is that when doing large transfers (200GB+) the 1TB msata 840EVO starts to slow down and will sometimes run at 100MB/s or slower whereas we have not had this problem with the 2.5" 1TB 840 EVO. Doing a better job of cooling (even just fanning the air above a drive under test) improves mSATA performance. Not a big deal if you do not do large contiguous writes. We have never had any problem with Read performance.Reply

Has anyone actually bought one of these 1TB drives?I have bought 2, from two different locations about 6 weeks apart. If you copy a large quantity of data (over 400gB) from another disk to one of these drives, they will fail during the write. They disappear completely, are not visible at all unless you do a reboot. Thje 500GB works fine.I have verified this now on two different SATA3 controllers and on three different Windows 7 computers. Both 1TB drives fail on write.RMA is in process with Samsung. I was told it sounds like a controller issue on the SSD.Reply

We have 6 of the 1TB mSATA drives and have no problem with large writes (up to 800GB) except the thermal issues mentioned above. With forced air cooling the performance is sustained throughout the transfer. without cooling speeds drop to less that 100MB/sec and it will actually pause and then resume (but not fail). we have had no failures after many full disk writes.Reply

It seems that Samsung has updated the firmware on the 1TB mSATA 840EVO. Now when the mSATA drive overheats it throttles by alternately halting for a second, then running full bore for a second. This is less disconcerting than the previous version which would slow down for long periods or even stop for 10-20 seconds. Reply